Facebook has been testing a new photo uploading experience in its mobile app with a limited number of users, TechCrunch reported Monday.
Facebook for iPhone and iPad now lets people optionally adorn their photos with text overlays, touch them up with quick color adjustments and make them more interesting with crazy photo stickers, all before uploading them to the service. The new photo uploader is not live for everyone yet, but we’ll keep you posted.
A new flashing magic wand button in the bottom left corner of the photo interface provides access to these new features and ones available before, such as Instagram-style filters, tagging friends in the photos, applying text overlays, cropping the image and using photo stickers.
Swipeable filters
Now when you upload photos to Facebook, you can instantly apply photo filters by ways of swiping. A new vertical line runs across the photo, letting you know you can swipe left or right to switch between automatic color correction or adjusting colors with aptly named filters such as Vintage, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Snow.
“The swiping feels satisfying and makes it quick compare adjacent filters, though a bit harder to choose between two that aren’t next to each other,” notes TechCrunch.
Text overlays
In addition to quick photo touch-ups, the new image uploader makes it easy to overlay custom text over an image using an interface similar to the text tool in Facebook’s Slingshot app. These bare-bone options let you type a custom string of text, resize and move it over the photo, use a vertical color slider to choose a hue and more.
Photo stickers
Photo stickers have debuted in Facebook’s Stickered app before making their way into the mobile Facebook Messenger app. The new photo uploader now lets you plaster cute accoutrements all over your images before posting them to the social network.
You just choose a photo sticker and with one tap apply it to your image. You can move the sticker around by way of dragging, as well as rotate and resize it with your finger. There are more than plenty built-in stickers available to keep you going.
All told, I think it’s a smart move on Facebook’s part to consolidate the various image editing options available in its mobile apps like Paper, Facebook, Slingshot and Messenger under one unified interface.
Consistency is the name of the game here and thus far, the photo uploading and image editing experience has not been very streamlined or consistent across Facebook apps, so this is clearly a step in the right direction.
It’s unclear when the new photo uploader will roll out to everyone, but it shouldn’t be too long now that the social networking behemoth is testing it in the wild.
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Source: TechCrunch